Sep 15, 2016

Egyptian Rat Slap

ERS is a matching card game with war like elements and slapping where players attempt to gain all the cards of the deck before their friends do. Designed to be played with two to four players sitting around a table. This makes for a great time filling game for board game groups and those waiting for their food to arrive at a restaurant.

Jet Island mods

Hook Island - I found using only the hook shot for movement to be really fun, significally different experience from the full mobility experience. This mod reduces your fuel reserves to nearly empty, and the jet's power to nothing.

Bunny Hop On Trigger - This VR game has uses room movement to trigger jumps. The user must crouch down and rise at a decent rate. For both those that this is physically unconfirbable, and those playing seated, I add an option for the player to jump by a button press. For speedrunning purposes, I would consider this cheating.

Checkpoint Hopper - Normally, checkpoints are only used upon player death, returning you to the last checkpoint you touched. A common strategy is stop using checkpoints once the player has a checkpoint on the highest island, and purposely dying to get back up there and traveling where they want to go. This mod adds the ability to teleport between checkpoints that you have visited, provided you are currently at a checkpoint.

Map Retexture - I found the techie style texture for the map to look cool, but be functionally difficult to use. This mod uses one of the player model's textures instead, resulting in an opaque visual.

Delete Profile X - As the speedrunning crowd grew, more of us wanted an easier way to delete existing profiles to get fresh starts for the "Any % new game" category. The only way to delete existing profiles was reg editing. This mod added keyboard shortcuts to reset a profile, as well as optionally send the user back to the main menu, helping to restart dead runs.

Positional Save State - For the use of speedrunners to learn a section, this mod allows the user to select their current location as a place to return to at any point in the future. It doesn't remember your speed, nor does it reset bosses, both of which have been requested by players.

Fall Damage Bad Mkay - Someone in the Discord jokingly asked for fall damage to harm the player. The game measures magnitude of collisions to apply visuals and sound effects. This mod taps into that. Anything larger then a medium hit results in being sent back to a checkpoint.

Game of Life simulator

This project began as a tool to create a strong setup for Botania's Dandelifeon. Here is a video showing this Minecraft mod in action.

While creating the simulator, I quickly lost sight of my objective and enjoyed adding more features to the simulator. It supports dynamically changing rules (who are valid neighbors, born/survive neighbor counts), has genetics in the form of cell color, and tracks lineage (cell family age) and cell age (important values for the Dandelifeon).

Choosing options that prevent cells from dying, as seen in the lower screenshot, can result in interesting patterns.

Level Generator for Speedrunners

Speedrunners is a game about out running your opponents. All the maps in the game are hand crafted, and the ones in use for rank are mostly well known. I like the idea of playing on random maps, where no one has ever seen the map before. This gives less value in memorizing routes of the popular maps, and gives value in figuring out routes during play.

See the attached album to see the progress this generator took as it was being created. I recall the generation taking less than a minute to make a looped level. There is still work to be done to make the levels more interesting, as all of the maps are limited to being a single tunnel. A major limitation I had was importing my data into the game to play with the maps. This limitation eventually halted development of this project.

Super Sudoku

My father enjoys making puzzles. In 2012, he started making 3D Sudoku by hand (9*9*9 puzzles). Finding his tools primitive, I created a viewer to help him continue his craft. Since he had a stronger tool, he began working on more complicated setups. As he advanced his craft, I enhanced the tool. By the end, the tool had a basic solver that helped answer a question we had, "How few clues could be required to solve a Super Sudoku?"

In regular sudoku, 17 clues has been found to be the minimum or about 21% of the 81 cell puzzle. With Super Sudoku, the minimum appears to be 43 or just 6% of the 729 cells. - Roy Watts

DBAO - Database Access Object

This tool creates code based on a template for a given database table. I estimate that each time we used this at Pyramedium, we saved two days of work.

C#, Forms, XML

June 2010

Discord Bot: AkiBot

This bot is an interface to many of my hobby projects.

The bot can announce an upcoming Challonge tournament, as well as signups for that tournament.

One of the features I miss from other VoIP apps is a chat log history of who joined and left a channel. The membership plugin implements this feature.

Though a audit log exist within Discord, having a channel message is easier to see. The membership plugin also shows users joining/leaving a server, changing their name, and announce changes in members' roles.

Using `>role get` and `>role drop`, users can self alter their roles in a server, gaining/losing the role with the same name as the channel.

`>art wave new` generates a random Wave Mountain from the project mentioned previously in this list.

The current players online for a Minecraft server can be echoed into a Discord server.

The game Guess, also known to some as Master Mind, can be played with the bot.

As can minesweeper, using spoiler tags in Discord, and the honor system.

A Particle Helper for Game Maker

I have yet to see a particle system that didn't need to be played with. I wanted an easy way to alter the settings of a particle, allowing for exploration of possibilities. All of the particles used in my Match 3 prototype came from this tool.

Name That Abbreviation

I enjoy taking a few letters and figuring out what it could be an abbreviation for. Being from Colorado,
our license plates give ample access to 3 letter combinations to play this game with. To play this game with more players, I post daily a NTA on twitter. It considers the frequency that letters appear as the first letter of English words (about 50k words in the statistics dictionary) for frequency that a letter is chosen. I don't think Z has come up in the nearly 3 years it has been running.

March 2015

Shortcut Manipulation tool

Many games alter the resolution of a monitor as they launch. Each time this happened, all my neatly organized icons on my desktop would be shoved to one side. This was quite annoying to fix each time, so I figured out how to move shortcuts on a desktop, filtered them by file type and specific names to allow single button press organization of my icons. Alas, it no longer worked once I finally left Windows XP.

C#, Forms, XML

March 2011

Blank EVE Character Generator

EVE Online is a MMO in space. Where most MMOs separate large groups of players into separate servers, EVE has a single server for all players. There is a tool for EVE Online that helps players track their training within the game called EVEMon, short for EVE Monitor. At the time I wrote a blank template generator for EVEMon, it provided a means of importing data as a new character to edit. I utilized publicly available data to know what a base character would based on multiple options, and gave an XML output for users to import into EVEMon.

Around five years after I wrote this generator, EVE greatly changed how new characters work in order to improve new player experience.

PHP, MySQL

Nov '08

Student Success System

For my Senior Project at DeVry, I got the opportunity to develop a Student Retention Management system for use by DeVry Westminster. I wrote a blog during the development of SSS. It was my first full stack experience, building a site from the ground up.

VB.NET, SQL Server

Feb 2008

FFX-2 Sphere Break

Sphere Break is a math mini game within Final Fantasy X-2. While creating this project, I learned about dynamic control creation. I don't provide a public download for this, as I don't feel I should.

C#, Forms

Download: Ask

Aug 2006

Text based UNO

During CIS115, I needed something to work on while finished with the provided assignments, and UNO was it. It was enjoyable to figure out card shuffling, game management, and a simple weak AI.

C#

May 2006

Red Faction - Level Design

Red Faction gave a great tool to create levels in. I previously wrote an article about my time using their tool.

RED Level Editor

June 2003

Links to Other Projects

Projects to be added:
NUnit: TimeSandbox - A tool for testing variations of code for speed of execution by running each sample for a given number of seconds or cycles.
Fallout Caravan - Recreation of the Fallout: New Vegas mini-game as both a website correspondence game, and a text bot game.
Altitude Ladder site - Altitude Community contribution for displaying results of competitive gameplay.
IRCBot, TwitchBot

Hi. This is a copy paste of the template used above that was suppose to be hidden from you.

TITLE

Aug 1, 2016

About four years ago I first noticed that scrolling screens that were not controlled by the player caused me motion sickness. This seems to be worsened by a need to read text on or near the scrolling image.

Terraria

The title screen of Terraria is a scrolling screen that is moving leftward. This moving background is the same that is within the game, but because the background only moves based on the character's actions, I've only been bothered by the title screen. Generally I can navigate the menu quickly enough to avoid much sickness.

Card City Nights

In deck editing screens, deck selection, and victory screens, the background scrolls diagonally. When I originally played this game, I wrote an email to the developer Friday night, and continued playing. The game was interesting enough to grin and bear it thought the sickness. Within a business day of receiving my email, the developer added a setting to their settings file that disables background movement.
In: C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\LocalLow\Ludosity\CardCityNights\Profile.txt
DeactivateBackgroundScrolling|100

Cthulhu Realms

In July 2016, the title screen had a scrolling background. In September 2016 they upgraded the look of the title screen to be in a significantly decorated room. Alas, this room is navigated by a floating camera that moves from place to place in the room as a loop.

Magic 2014

I'm not certain which year of Magic, but at least one screen had a rotation around an object view which I think was a victory screen.

Bloodline Champions

The victory screen rotates around the playfield. (last tested in 2012 iirc)

Free Fall - Maleficent

In the Moors questline, level 200 (start of chapter 11) introduces a water character with flowing water around them. This is presented as a scrolling background.

Star Trek: Bridge Crew

The main menu is inside of a pod orbiting a ship. While looking at the menu options, stars are moving in the background.

Room Motion via VR

Room Motion is when a Virtual Reality (VR) room moves differently than the Real Life (RL) room does. This can be seen in elevators, games with vehicle movement (at least when the player is inside the vehicle, but not if the player is 3rd person controlling the vehicle), or forced movement. I have since gained much stronger VR legs, and have a Steam Curator VR Motion, with the goal of helping people understand the kinds of Room Motion a game has.

Rise to Ruins

The title screen is in motion. Much like Terraria. There is a hidden setting in /profiles/settings.properties called mainMenuDrift that can be set to false to disable it

Ziggurat by Milkstone

The post boss victory screen has a background in motion over text. I believe if this part of a room navigated by the player, it wouldn't give me motion sickness, but because it has text on it it does. Similar to Bloodline Champions.

Clash Royale

In March 2020, they released a new theme arena based on a cake being delivered somewhere. The top of the screen has constant movement as the cake moves upward.

Apr 22, 2016

It was the third day of class. The teacher had taught the class how to use if else statements, while and for loops, multiple methods, and today added switch statements and classes. One of the students completed their assignment in a fraction of the time allotted for the day.

"So far, I've given you a box of crayons with just a few colors inside of it and asked you to color in the lines as best as you can. You have completed that assignment, and perhaps you are done for the day. Or, you can use those crayons to draw your own picture, or perhaps find more colors to make more elaborate art."